The Setup - "Alexander Hamilton" & The Question of Narrative Power
Hamilton opens with a question that haunts all national origin stories: "How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence impoverished get up and climb?"
This is Lin-Manuel Miranda asking: WHO GETS TO BE REMEMBERED? Who gets their story told? Whose narrative survives?
Nigeria's founding story has the same problem. We celebrate Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, and Kwame Nkrumah (the "Big Four"), but how many know about Herbert Macaulay? Samuel Ajayi Crowther? Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti fighting for women's rights while the "official" founding fathers got the credit?
In "Alexander Hamilton," we meet a young immigrant with ambition. In Nigeria's founding, we meet men shaped by colonialism, educated abroad, returning to fight for independence. But like Hamilton, the question persists: who decided these men were the heroes?
Both America and Nigeria are still asking: what comes next? How do we actually build the systems we claimed to be building?
America's answer has been: slow, painful incremental change. Every right has to be fought for. Every generation has to reimagine the system.
Nigeria's answer has been less clear. We've had coups, democracies, military rule, corruption, hope, despair. We're still figuring it out.
Neither nation has solved the fundamental problem: how do you build a system that genuinely represents everyone when the people designing it are the most powerful people in the nation?
You can't. That's the answer. You can't design liberation when you're benefiting from the system you're supposedly transforming. Change has to come from outside the system, from the people being excluded, from the ones the founding didn't make room for.
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What Comes Next? (Actual Question)